Proposal for celebrating Science Day at GMRT, Pune

On 28th Feb. and March 1, Science Day is celebrated all over India. In that context, as we have been celebrating for the last four years, we also want to do it this year as well, so here's a short mail I have prepared for the organizers . Please share your inputs whatever you think are valuable. If you think of something then that should either be doable by the Pune team or you would be coming down to Pune to showcase $stuff. Mind you this year we haven't done any fund-raising at all so making that part aware as well. Here goes nothing -

Dear Mr. Abhijit,

I am writing to you on behalf of FOSS Community India.

I am confirming on behalf of FOSS Community India and Mozilla India that we would again be taking part this year.

We are not aware or sure of what stall sizes are for offer but would like to have two largish stalls next to each other without a partition blocking either of us. This works for both the communities as both of us feed off each other and have same/similar philosophies about privacy,
transparency and free and open culture.

Just to share, here's a bit of history about FOSS Community -

FOSS Community India has been under operation since early 2008.

My own interaction with FOSS Community India has been since 2010 which allowed me to travel quite a bit in and around India as well as be part of Debconf 2016 in South Africa.

https://flossexperiences.wordpress.com/tag/debconfindia/

and

https://flossexperiences.wordpress.com/tag/debutsav/

Indian experiences .

https://flossexperiences.wordpress.com/tag/debconf16/ - South Africa experiences

I have been contributing to Debian for quite sometime now -

bugs.debian.org/from:[email protected]

As well as https://github.com/shirishag75 for upstream contributions.

Few of my blog posts are also mirrored on planet debian

https://flossexperiences.wordpress.com/tag/planet-debian/

There are several mini and major project ideas that FOSS Community India has under its banner for prospective budding developers -

https://www.loomio.org/g/esPoQ4S0/fosscommunity-in

As can be seen, there there is always work that can be done by budding developers who want to work on FOSS for understanding the value it has as well as sharpening their skils so that they could either work as freelancers or use the learnings and experiences from here to better their resume.

Praveen has been a curator and one of the brains behind creation of 'Foss Community India'.

We have been participating in GMRT, Science Day for last 4 years and each year has been better than the last in terms of organization of the event itself.

If we get a stall for GMRT, we would use it to showcase Debian, prototyping and embedded computing using SBC's such as Raspberry Pi and whatever SBC's we can find as well as talk about digital literacy, privacy, technical debt and other such awareness building conversations.

We are also hoping to rope in people working on gcc as well as people who are working on linaro but this is not yet confirmed.

We also would be trying to initiate conversations around scientific temper which I guess is necessary with the prevailing situation around the country.

If possible, we would also like to recruit some budding developers who could probably help us with some of the projects which we hope to initiate under FOSS Community India, Pune banner/chapter.

We did 'a re-introduction to Debian project' couple of months back at Reserved Bit.

http://list.plug.org.in/pipermail/plug-mail/2017-November/010827.html

I did a follow-up as to what happened in the event at
http://list.plug.org.in/pipermail/plug-mail/2017-November/010839.html

Praveen and Shruti Chandran have been trying to get people to donate to update npm in debian as well as they have done quite a bit on browserify too.

See https://www.generosity.com/fundraising/update-npm-package-in-debian

and

https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/package-browserify-node-module-for-debian

After firefox 57.0 many of the web-extensions need npm to get it to build. Having it built makes sure that the packages are somewhat audited and secure.

FOSS Community also runs a diaspora pod with xmpp chat at poddery.com and a git hosting service at git.fosscommunity.in

I hope the above is sufficient enough of our genuine concern to share our knowledge and experience with students and at least get them started on some of the above ideas.

Looking forward to your response.

Let me know if something is missing.